Zachary D. Kaufman is a CDDRL pre-doctoral fellow in the academic year 2005-2006. Mr. Kaufman is completing his DPhil (PhD) in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he is a Marshall Scholar and he is writing a dissertation on U.S. policy on the establishment of war crimes tribunals. Afterwards, he will attend Yale Law School. Mr. Kaufman is also currently co-editing (with Dr. Phil Clark) a forthcoming book on transitional justice, post-conflict reconstruction, and reconciliation in Rwanda since the 1994 genocide.

Mr. Kaufman's professional experience has focused on the investigation, apprehension, and prosecution of suspected perpetrators of atrocities, including genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and terrorism. He has served at the United States Departments of State and Justice, the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Court.

Mr. Kaufman is also the founder, president, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Friends of the Kigali Public Library; co-founder and Executive Director of Marshall Scholars for the Kigali Public Library; and honorary member of the Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga, Rwanda. Together, these three non-profit organizations are fundraising and collecting books for, raising public awareness about, and building Rwanda's first public library, the Kigali Public Library. Mr. Kaufman is also a Board Member and Senior Fellow of Humanity in Action, which, in order to engage student leaders in the study and work of human rights, sponsors an integrated set of education programs and internships for university students in Europe and the United States.

In 2004, Mr. Kaufman received his M.Phil (Master's) degree in International Relations from the University of Oxford. In 2000, Mr. Kaufman received his B.A. (Bachelor's) degree in Political Science from Yale University.

Mr. Kaufman's talk will discuss U.S. participation in establishing a UN-backed international war crimes tribunal for addressing the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The origin of the ICTR is complicated and controversial because of the number, attractiveness, and precedence of alternative mechanisms, as well as the pitfalls of establishing such a tribunal. Given the extent, recency, and persistence of atrocities, Mr. Kaufman's research is crucially relevant to academic and policy discussions in the post-9/11 world.

On May 20-21, 2006, the Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) of Stanford University and the China Institute for Science and Technology Policy (CISTP) of Tsinghua University will co-sponsor a workshop in Beijing, China, with the collaboration of Zhongguancun Science Park and the Industrial Technology Research Institute. The English version of the proceedings will be published by SPRIE.

Theme and Topics

The theme is the progress in and challenges to Greater China's innovative capacities. The workshop will include discussions of key drivers of innovative capacity: the inputs, processes, institutions, management strategies and outputs, including evidence of innovative capacities as demonstrated in new products, processes, services or business models.

The workshop will focus on information technology and telecommunications, focusing on development within and linkages among Mainland China and Taiwan, plus Singapore and Silicon Valley. Workshop sessions will include:

Statistical indicators

Corporate R&D: Multinational and domestic firms

University and research institute R&D

Science and technology human resources

Regional innovation

New technologies and business models

Papers invited include case studies of products and of firms, analysis of trends and cross-industry or cross-regional comparisons.

Workshop Format

Attendance at the two-day workshop will be by invitation only. More than twenty papers will be presented and discussed by a group of international scholars; panel participants will include senior industry leaders and government policy makers. The workshop format will facilitate discussions.

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).

John Barton is a professor emeritus at the Stanford Law School, an FSI senior fellow by courtesy, and a CHP/PCOR associate. His research and publications focus on international scientific research and cooperation, the relationship between intellectual property and antitrust, and the transfer of technology -- particularly vaccine production technology -- to developing countries. Barton has recently published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the pharmaceutical development process, and is co-author of the product development priorities chapter in the forthcoming book Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries. He has participated extensively in discussions regarding drug access for developing nations. He is also interested in the marketing structure of the pharmaceutical industry and the impact of vaccine regulation on the structure of the international vaccine industry.

Professor Kotkin is involved in a number of Princeton, academic and corporate activities. At Princeton, Professor Kotkin is currently the director of the Program in Russian Studies, Princeton University. He is also a member of the Advisory Board, Center of International Studies (2002), the Editorial Board and Trustees, Princeton University Press (2003) and a host of other organizations on campus.

In the academic field he is a member of the Social Science Research Council, Committee on Russia and Eurasia (2001) and has long been an editorial board member for International Labor and Working Class History (ILWCH, 1994), as well as acting in a number of other positions in Rem Koolhass Harvard Project on the City (2001), Kritika: Explorations in European and Eurasian History (1999), and many other organizations.

He is currently writing a book entitled Lost in Siberia: Dreamworlds of Eurasia. It's a study of the Ob River valley -- which runs from the Altai Mountains to the Arctic -- over seven centuries, based on local archives, and it combines approaches from the Annales school and from the twentieth-century avant-garde. His research interests range across Eurasia, from Japan to Britain, in the modern period, and include topics such as empire, nation building, political corruption, modernity and modernism.

Trygve Olson is a political and public affairs professional who brings nearly twenty years of experience, working on five continents, to his profession. He has served in his present capacity since January 2001, and also served as IRI's Resident Program Officer in Lithuania in 1997.

Prior to rejoining IRI in 2001, Mr. Olson was a founding partner in the grassroots lobbying, political consulting and public affairs firm Public Issue Management, LLP. While a partner at Public Issue Management, Trygve managed a number of high profile grassroots lobbying campaigns for clients in the aviation, technology, and healthcare sectors. For two years he co-managed the grassroots side of a national campaign on behalf of several of America's largest technology companies and the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Also during this prior Mr. Olson served as the primary campaign consultant to a coalition that was victorious in the 2000 Lithuanian Parliamentary elections.

A native of Wisconsin, Trygve worked in the Administration of then-Governor Tommy Thompson and also ran a number of Congressional, State Senatorial and State Legislative campaigns during the early and mid 1990's. Over the course of his career in politics, Mr. Olson has worked on in excess of 100 campaigns for all levels of public office from the local to national level. Since first volunteering for IRI in 1995 -- when he went to Poland to run a get out the vote campaign for young people -- Mr. Olson has helped advise political parties and candidates in numerous countries throughout the world including nearly all of Central and Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Serbia.

Trygve is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He currently makes his home in Vilnius, Lithuania with his wife, Erika Veberyte, who serves as the Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to the Speaker of the Lithuanian Parliament.